A technological, time-saving solution for site inspections

Dan Tedrow was an engineer in the Navy when he was handed the task of examining a new building being constructed. The project, he was told, had zero defects.

Tedrow walked into the project with a clean notepad; he left with page after page filled with problems he’d discovered. As he sat down to transcribe the deficiencies into a required format, he realized he had hours of work in front of him.

“It took quite a bit of time,” he said. “I started thinking, ‘What if we had a tool on our tablets to collect the data?’ ”

In the years since that building inspection, Tedrow has moved into his current position as engineering director at the Portland office of PlanB Consultancy International. Technology also has advanced, allowing his spark of an idea to be transformed into a real-world product called otto-log, which Tedrow and his colleague John Buffaloe, a business manager with PlanB Consultancy, believe is destined to become a useful tool for the construction industry.

Developed in cooperation with Windsor Solutions, a Portland-based company, otto-log allows inspectors out in the field to automate the entry of data – such as listing project defects – using customized forms, either online or offline. The gathered information, once uploaded to a cloud-hosted storage system, can then be accessed by users across a variety of platforms and operating systems.

When Tedrow came up with the idea for a field-driven IT solution that eventually would develop into otto-log, he figured it would be easy to find a product already on the market. However, the options were slim, and what he did find was too complex or too awkward.

“This is not rocket science,” Tedrow said. “You would think that someone would have done this out there.”

Unable to find a tool on the market that fit what he had in mind, Tedrow toyed with the idea of creating his own device-driven system for gathering, compiling and sharing information from field inspections. He even started to develop the tool with an associate, until he realized the partnership wasn’t working and put the project on hold.

Then he joined PlanB Consultancy in Portland. His colleagues, including Buffaloe, were excited by Tedrow’s idea. Working together, they tracked down a Portland-based tech company called Windsor Solutions and its product called nSpect.

Located on Southwest Macadam Street in Portland, Windsor Solutions opened in 1998 as a small business venture. Sixteen years later, the company is still small by choice.

“(Windsor Solutions) isn’t the typical IT firm,” Tedrow said. “It’s all local work and products.”

The tech company had developed its nSpect suite of tools specifically for environmental work, but it also had the ability to customize or add features to tailor it to fit the needs of other industries – such as construction.

“We looked at what they had, they looked at what we had, and we put them together,” Tedrow said.

Otto-log, the result of that collaboration and now available through PlanB, is designed to allow users a high level of independence, according to Steve Rosenberger, Windsor Solutions’ nSpect product manager. Customizing an entire provided basic form, for example, is a relatively simple task that will usually take about an hour.

While otto-log is available through PlanB, Windsor Solutions is still involved with the product, offering tech assistance and working with PlanB on ongoing improvements, which are pushed to users as soon as they’re ready.

“You don’t have to come back to us to design forms or workflow processes,” Simon Watson, Windsor Solutions’ vice president of business development, said. “You would never have to talk to us again, unless you wanted to.”

PlanB has found uses for otto-log outside the specific construction niche. Researchers at the firm’s office in Hawaii, where environmental work is done, earned recognition this year for tapping fishermen in the area to help with coral counts using tablets enabled with otto-log.

But Tedrow promises the system will continue to remain dedicated mainly for use in the building industry, even as competitors eyeing the construction market push out new products.

“There’s a lot of software out there, but it all tries to do everything,” Tedrow said. “We’re trying to keep (otto-log) focused.”